Posted On: Nov 9, 2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the preview of Customer Provided Ephemeris support for AWS Ground Station, empowering space vehicle owners to provide their own position and trajectory information for a satellite as it orbits the Earth. Over the next year, satellite ride share providers are planning on launching more than 100 satellites from around the world. With Customer Provided Ephemeris, flight operations crews can conduct tracking and telemetry operations for space vehicles until entry into final orbit. Customers can also use this feature to improve the quality of tracking of satellites already in orbit and to modify antenna pointing based on orbital maneuvers.
For satellites that are in operations today, AWS Ground Station provides the data required to point the antenna to the correct satellite during a contact. With Customer Provided Ephemeris, satellite vehicle owners can upload their own position data using either the Two Line Element (TLE) or Orbital Ephemeris Message (OEM) formats for each contact. Governments, businesses, and universities can use Customer Provided Ephemeris to provide more timely and accurate satellite position information during the Launch and Early Operations (LEOPs) of a new satellite, when no historical data is available. Customer Provided Ephemeris can also be used to account for the use of satellite propulsion systems, which would make previously known trajectory information incorrect.
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets customers control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Customers can integrate their space workloads with other AWS services in real-time using Amazon’s low-latency, high-bandwidth global network. Customers can stream their satellite data to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for real-time processing, store data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for low cost archiving, or apply AI/ML algorithms to satellite images with Amazon SageMaker. With AWS Ground Station, customers pay only for the actual antenna time that they use.
AWS Ground Station antennas are now available in North America (Ohio, Hawaii, Oregon), Middle East (Bahrain), Europe (Ireland, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney), Africa (Cape Town), and South America (Punta Arenas).